Catastrophism

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2014

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Catastrophism, the idea that natural disasters have had a significant influence in moulding the Earth's geological features. In 1822 William Buckland, the first reader of Geology at the University of Oxford, published his famous Reliquae Diluvianae, in which he ascribed most of the fossil record to the effects of Noah's flood. Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology challenged these writings, arguing that geological change was slow and gradual, and that the processes responsible could still be seen at work today - a school of thought known as Uniformitarianism. But in the 1970s the idea that natural catastrophes were a major factor in the Earth's geology was revived and given new respectability by the discovery of evidence of a gigantic asteroid impact 65 million years ago, believed by many to have resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs. With: Andrew Scott Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London Jan Zalasiewicz Senior Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester Leucha Veneer Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, 65 million years ago, a massive object from outer space slammed into what is now
0:17.5	the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. A five mile wide asteroid made a crater 12 miles deep and 180 across which is still visible today.
0:27.0	Many scientists believe this catastrophic event killed three quarters of life on Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
0:34.0	When the evidence for this impact was first discovered in the early 1980s, it reawaked
0:38.1	interest in the theory of geology which had long fallen out of fashion,
0:42.1	catastrophism. Catastrophism is the idea that the earth's surface
0:46.1	has been shaped by a series of drastic events. The term is particularly associated with the
0:50.8	19th century French geologist George Cubier, who believed that
0:54.9	fossils of extinct creatures proved that the world had undergone some major
0:58.6	catastrophes in its past. All those ideas have been long disregarded by scientists,
1:04.0	recent discoveries suggest that he may have had a point.
1:07.0	With me to discuss catastrophes him are Andrew Scott,
1:10.0	Lebehum a Maritist fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway University of London,
1:15.3	Jan Zala Sheevich, senior lecturer in geology at the University of Leicester,
1:19.7	and Lucia Vanier, visiting scholar at the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester.
1:25.0	Andrews got catastrophism was an important theory in geology for many years.
1:29.0	Before we get to it, in more detail, could you tell us what it is okay
1:33.3	William Hugh in 1832 defined the word catastrophism and he also actually
1:39.3	coined the term uniformitarianism
1:41.5	catastrophism, he said,
	...

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